Using BlockingCollection

BlockingCollection<T> is one of the most useful concurrent collections. As we saw in Chapter 7, BlockingCollection<T> was created to be an implementation of the producer/consumer pattern for .NET. Let’s review some of the specifics of this collection before creating a different kind of sample project.

BlockingCollection details

One of the major draws of BlockingCollection<T> for developers working with parallel code implementations is that it can be swapped to replace List<T> without too many additional modifications. You can use the Add() method for both. The difference with BlockingCollection<T> is that calling Add() to add an item will block the current thread if another read or write operation is in process. If you want to specify a timeout period on the operation, you can use TryAdd(). The TryAdd() method optionally supports both timeouts and cancellation tokens.

Removing items from BlockingCollection<T...